Blogging: Marketing’s Magic Potion

If you missed corecubed‘s latest webinar on the marketing importance of blogging, we covered a lot of ground on not only how to blog but also how to measure your blog to ensure you’re getting positive results. The following are some highlights from that webinar on how to plan and use a business blog to reach your audience and get measurable results:

Know Your Audience: As a business, you probably already know who your target market is, but do you know what information is important to them? Researching your clients, their purchasing habits, online tendencies, etc. can help you understand what information they find relevant and what kinds of information would be contained in blog posts they are most likely to read.

Be Relevant: Once you know the intended target for your blog, blogging becomes as simple as producing well-written, relevant content on a regular basis. While that sounds like a large order to accomplish on top of your other responsibilities, keep in mind that blogs don’t have to be long to be engaging. But do make sure that all your posts include well-researched information that is important to your target audience in order to prove to your readers that you are the industry expert they’ve been looking for and ensure returns to your site to read more or to find out more.

Make It Social: In Robert Scoble’s classic 2006 book, Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, he lists the social aspect of blogs as one of their six key pillars; and that is still true, and even more so, today. He writes, “The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting, topical conversations move from site to site linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build friendships unrestricted by geographic area.” That’s why social media and blogging are a match made in networking heaven. Use your company’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest accounts to help spread the word about your blog and the valuable information it provides to the masses, and encourage employees to help get the word out via their own social channels.

Measure What’s Working: Other blogging advantages, according to Scoble, and still applicable to today’s market, are that blogs are findable, syndicatable, and linkable, all of which allow your site to be seen by as many eyes as possible. However, you won’t know if your blog is effective in any of these ways without regular measuring. As a strategic part of your marketing plan, your blog should help guide users to your main website, so it’s important to take stock of how much traffic your posts are actually generating. Google Analytics is a great tool that allows you to track not only traffic to your site, but also to drill down to individual posts to find out where you’re getting the most clicks (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, a Google keyword search, etc.).

Keep Up with the Changes: Blogging used to be a great way to fit in those precious SEO keywords that Google used to hold in such high regard, and that’s still true. However, with Google’s latest update, the emphasis is now less about content-based keywords and more about quality of content, which in turn encourages natural linking relationships with other sites. This means that in order to keep a high ranking in Google’s search engine, it’s more vital for bloggers to do their research and create top-notch posts for their readers than it is to concentrate on cramming a blog post with keywords.

Static sites are a thing of the past and Internet users demand more from companies before they’ll hand over their loyalty (and money!). Blogging is an easy way to put a personal spin on a company while providing valuable information to a target audience and increasing viability in the search engines. If you’d like to hear more from our blogging webinar, listen to the recording here.